Mesa 3D

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Preamble:

2009-07-11: Doing some research looking for GL/glext.h and wglext.h, ran across this alternative OpenGL implemetation...

Mesa 3D

Review of Mesa - An implementation of the OpenGL API. The source I downloaded, MesaLib-7.4.4.zip, consists of 4 projects in windows/VC8/mesa/mesa.sln - gdi, glu, mesa, osmesa - with 4 configuration Debug, Debug Static CRT, Release, and Release Static CRT. Since at present, all other components are built with /MDd and /MD, I use just the Debug and Release...

Since 3 of these a shared library (DLL) projects, mesa.lib is a static library, I only initially build the release. I hope to not have to debug these libraries ;=() It build well, and I have, in the 'lib' folder, GLU32.[dll|lib], OPENGL32.[dll|lib], OSMESA32.[dll|lib], and mesa.lib. I guess these are to 'replace' my 2006 dated glu32.dll and opengl32.dll in C:\Windows\System32!

But since some sample programs, MesaDemos-7.4.4.zip, and a MesaGLUT-7.4.4zip implementation are include, I decide to cautiously build these, and see... Hmmm, neat the Demos and GLUT unzip into the same directory, so this shows they are sort of meant to be together ;=)) So I add the glut.dsp to the mesa project, and on build come up with a missing function glutWritePPMFile, but this just seems they missed adding src/glut/glx/glut_ppm.c to the dsp file - the source is dated 2009, while this DSP is date 2008 sort of confirms this. This adds a GLUT32.[dll|lib] to the growing list.

Ah, if I had loaded the windows/VC6/progs/progs.dsw, this would have loaded glut.dsp, and the only sample, gears.dsp. So I add gears.dsp to the solution, and it compiles. I copy Release/gears.exe to /lib to run it, and bingo, I have my usual (unix) glxgear application running. Unfortunately, not a very pleasing result when run - only about 330 frames per second (fps). glxgears in my Ubuntu installation consistently produces over 9,000 fps! Debug gears.exe, with the debug shared libraries, only ran at 35-40 fps!!

But the most important thing is that _
(a) I have new replacement DLL for the current OLD ones, and
(b) I have a GL directory with a whole bunch of headers - gl.h of course, but the missing glext.h is there, but still no wglext.h!
AND this mesa gl.h defines GL_VERSION_1_1 of course, but in addition GL_VERSION_1_2, GL_VERSION_1_3, and GL_ARB_imaging, among other things...

If you do NOT want to get into building Mesa for yourself, then there is a MesaWinBinaries-6.0.zip, which contains all the headers, and the 'lib' DLL/lib set, all dated 2004. In fact, these OLDER version gave a FASTER rate - 540 fps - than the new DLLs I have compiled with MSVC9 ;=() So I may end up using these ;=))

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